Argax Project:: Dissertation: A Rough Draft Node

Node Status: ROUGH

Contributions

The work presented here has made the following contributions to the development of a working interactive drama.

To begin, I reviewed the existing theoretical model of what comprises an interactive narrative. Although the foundations of this poetics had already been laid, it needed to be closely examined and then reformulated to correct the tensions introduced during its evolution. The overhauled poetics model proposed here more closely mirrors traditional narratology, as well as better informing system designs.

I then proposed that Johnstone's (1979) improv reincorporation technique effectively builds connections of narrative necessity between events in the resulting story. This means the finished story will be well-formed because all of its events will be essential to that story, such that they could not have been left out without breaking the narrative unity.

Guided by this reincorporation insight, a solid poetics theory, and the successes of previous scene-based interactive drama systems, I developed the Marlinspike architecture. This design offers a number of interesting new features.

First is the translation of a player's world-level deed to story-level actions. This allows the system to provide multiple, explicit story-level interpretations of the same physical deed. This translation can be customized by the specific context of the story in which it occurs. This narrows the scope of this tricky AI problem of interpretation. Not all possible interpretations of a deed need to be considered but only those relevant to the current story context.

Secondly, by explicitly treating player actions as story atoms on par with the system's scenes, the player is no longer subservient to the author's scenes. This has the potential to increase player story-level agency. In most other scene-based approaches, players can only act within the bounds of scenes. In Marlinspike, the player can perform any legal deed at any time. This design implicitly mandates that the author consider player actions to be as significant to the story as his own scenes. This focus on the player's contributions to the story encourages the author to then build upon what the player has done. This provides an important conceptual balance of power between the player and author. As Brenda Laurel (1991) suggested, the key to an interactive drama is not to author a story and then try to make it interactive. Instead, the author and the audience should be active in the same space, building the story together. Marlinspike's design reflects this ideal.

Finally, Marlinspike explicitly models the story structure, complete with all action recasts and scene elements. The detail of this representation of events and the causal connections between them was only partly utilized in Demeter. However, such a model could be useful in a more sophisticated system. For example, NPCs could use this structure to trace the causality at work between events or to coherently summarize an earlier series of events.

The implementation of Marlinspike and the interactive drama, Demeter: Blood in the Sky, provided many practical lessons beyond the effects of reincorporation of the structure of story events. That work also suggested many improvements that could make Marlinspike a more robust interactive drama architecture.

The empirical evaluation of Marlinspike/Demeter showed that reincorporation was indeed important to forming an internal system story model of unified events. Like the lessons learned from the implementation, the evaluation results also highlighted that a successful interactive drama will be affected by all aspects of narrative--including its characters, setting, and manner--and not only by its events. The study also revealed that, while a text-based interactive drama can be successful, more attention first needs to be given to improving its affordances in order to provide adequate world-level agency.

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Works Cited

Johnstone, Keith. Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. New York: Routledge, 1979.
Laurel, Brenda. Computers as Theatre. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1991.